Porto-Novo

Porto-Novo is Hogbonu in Gun and Àjàṣẹ́ in Yoruba, and its kingdom was founded by a branch of the royal line of Allada that moved east to the lagoon in the 16th or 17th century. The site was good for trade: a sheltered inlet connected by creeks to Lake Nokoué, the Ouémé delta and the sea, within reach of the Yoruba towns inland. Portuguese traders gave it the name New Port and used it as an outlet for the slave trade, and Brazilian merchants and, later, formerly enslaved people returning from Brazil settled in the town.

Squeezed between Dahomey to the west and British-held Lagos to the east, the kingdom looked for a protector. After a British bombardment, Porto-Novo accepted French protection in 1863, and by 1900 it was the capital of French Dahomey. The French built their administration here while the wharf and then the port at Cotonou took the commerce, a division that has never gone away.

At independence in 1960 Porto-Novo kept the status of capital, and the national assembly still sits here, but the ministries, embassies and the seat of government remained in Cotonou. The town has therefore aged slowly: colonial offices, the old Afro-Brazilian merchant houses, the royal palace and the mosque survive in a low-rise centre that has not been rebuilt. Restoration projects have worked on parts of the historic fabric, and the town promotes itself as Benin's centre of heritage and museums rather than of business.

Porto-Novo sits where Gun, Yoruba and Fon worlds meet, and all three are audible in its streets along with French. Yoruba influence is strong: the Egungun masquerades, in which masked figures representing the ancestors move through the quarters accompanied by drums and attendants who keep the crowd at a distance, come from that tradition, while the raffia-covered Zangbeto, the night guardians of Gun communities, are the town's own. Vodun, Islam and Christianity are all practised openly, often within the same family.

The Agudá, descendants of Brazilian traders and of returnees from Brazil, shaped the town's appearance and its calendar. They brought the craft of the master builders who raised the Great Mosque and the merchant houses with their pilasters and shutters, kept Portuguese surnames such as da Silva, de Souza and Paraíso, and celebrate the Bourian masquerade, a Brazilian-derived carnival with a horse figure and brass instruments.

As a royal town, Porto-Novo kept its own kings until the death of the last of them in 1976, and palace ritual, drumming and funerals of note still draw large crowds. The town is also a centre of education and of the arts, with a long-running tradition of museums and cultural centres and a reputation among Beninese for being conservative, literate and slow-moving — a place, as residents put it, where the capital's status is honoured more than it is used.

About 264,000 people lived in the commune at the 2013 census, and estimates put it near 300,000 by 2023, making Porto-Novo Benin's second city but a fraction of the size of the Cotonou urban area. Many residents work in Cotonou, and the road between the two carries a heavy daily commute.

Work here is administration, education and trade. The national assembly, the prefecture of Ouémé and the public services employ a large share of formal workers; schools and teacher training add more. Everything else turns on markets and cross-border business with Nigeria, whose frontier is about 12 kilometres east: cloth, food, fuel and manufactured goods move both ways, much of it informally, and Nigerian price swings are felt quickly in local shops. Fishing in the lagoon and the Ouémé delta and farming on the plateau supply the markets.

The rhythm is provincial. Mornings are for the market and the offices, the middle of the day is hot and quiet, and evenings gather at the maquis, in churches and mosques and around televised football. Flooding in the rainy season, the state of the older buildings, unemployment among young people and the pull of Cotonou are the town's running concerns.

Porto-Novo eats maize, cassava and fish, with a Yoruba accent that sets it a little apart from the rest of southern Benin. The everyday starch is akassa, fermented maize dough wrapped in leaves, or amiwo, maize dough cooked in a tomato and palm-oil stock and served with chicken or fish. Sauces are built on tomato, okra, groundnut, leafy greens or the pungent fermented néré seed, and fish comes fresh, smoked or dried from the lagoon and the Ouémé delta — tilapia, catfish and shrimp.

Yoruba dishes are part of the repertoire: ata sauces heavy with chilli, moin-moin, a steamed pudding of ground cowpeas, and rice and bean dishes of the kind eaten across the border. Akara, fried cowpea fritters, are a morning staple; ablo, steamed maize and rice cakes, are eaten with fried fish and pepper sauce; and gari, coarse cassava meal, is soaked with sugar or cooked with tomato and egg.

The Agudá kept Brazilian-derived dishes for feast days, and coconut sweets and bean stews still appear at family occasions. Palm wine from the plateau is drunk fresh and distilled into sodabi; bissap, from hibiscus flowers, and pineapple juice are the usual soft drinks, and the town's bakeries turn out French bread every morning.